Potatoes grown through sheeting

[treepixie]

Decided this year to grow our spuds through sheeting and not earth them up, this was an experiment.

We grew 17 plants of Apache and 20 of kestrel, harvested them today and really pleased with the results.

So next year all ours will be grown through sheeting

[Penellype]

That's a heck of a lot of potatoes! How do you store them?

[treepixie]

In hessian sacks under the stairs where it's cool and dark, they keep for quite a few months

[Thelma Sanders]

Which sheeting did you use, or just ordinary black woven weed control fabric?

[muddled]

did you get much slug damage?
If not, did you use pellets or anything?

[treepixie]

Sheeting was the black landscaping fabric with the planting stripes

We used a few slug pellets under the edges of the sheeting, but not much slug damage at all, so really pleased, no weeding or earthing up

[Stan79]

I had mixed results under the thin fabric type weed suppressant membrane. I reckon it needs to be a decent thickness to ensure no light gets through to turn them green. The proper thick stuff as described above is no doubt better than the cheapo stuff that i used!

[treepixie]

We also mulched with grass cuttings to keep the light out

[muddled]

Okay...one more question...
I would normally harvest maincrop in Sept/Oct (unless the blight descends) so do you think if you'd left them another couple of months you'd have got more or were the haulms dying back early?

Because if the spuds just finish earlier under sheeting AND you don't have to leave space for earthing up....well just imagine how I could use all that extra growing space!!!! Imagine being able to put the sweetcorn where the maincrop spuds are? (corn does really well planted through sheeting).
This could be revolutionary you know!

[treepixie]

The label on the apaches said they were a second early, after reading your question I now find out that they are a main crop, that would explain why they were smaller than we were expecting, but they had stared to die back, so maybe we should have left them longer, oh well that's how you learn.

We still have the main crop under sheeting so will let you know how they do in a couple of months!!

Still on the plus side I now have room for the brassicas

[Snadger]

I had mixed results under the thin fabric type weed suppressant membrane. I reckon it needs to be a decent thickness to ensure no light gets through to turn them green. The proper thick stuff as described above is no doubt better than the cheapo stuff that i used!

Just a thought, but you could cover the soil with newspapers after you planted , but before putting the cheapo black membrane over the bed? This would also act as a water retainer.

[Thelma Sanders]

I was thinking that I could do that with cardboard - I always seem to have a pile of that